Author Spotlight

Tom Gunning

Tom Gunning is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute, 2000), as well as more than one hundred and fifty articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism.

5 Results
Some Things a Man Can’t Ride Around: Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Westerns

In his five collaborations with actor Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown, Boetticher presents an unsentimental vision of honor-bound men competing and banding together in a desolate landscape ruled by chance.

By Tom Gunning

The New World: Dwelling in Malick’s New World

In his masterful reimagining of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, Terrence Malick meditates on the nature of beauty and America’s path from innocence to experience.

By Tom Gunning

The Kid: The Grail of Laughter and the Fallen Angel

The Kid marked Charlie Chaplin’s wholehearted embrace of sentiment, which he intertwined with the slapstick he was known for to enrich his Tramp character and carry the narrative of feature-length directorial debut.


By Tom Gunning

Cinema of the Wolf: The Mystery of Marketa Lazarová

Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.

By Tom Gunning

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.” In 1933, Fritz Lang gave these words to his visionary figur

By Tom Gunning